After Fidel

...In Miami, bombings and other violent acts against foreign consulates, travel agencies, and radio stations were dishearteningly routine...

...Growing up, I knew Cuba only in stories and old pictures...

...And, as Lech Walesa likes to point out, the Communist system is unreformable...

...That same summer, a revolutionary tribunal in Santiago acquitted 57 air force officers of the former regime...

...Modernity was the reason for the revolution...

...Instability could further radicalize the regime and open more opportunities for Venezuela and Iran...

...The officers were executed en masse by machine gun...

...The word "change" has become common on T-shirts and in windows across Cuba, and the regime has reportedly launched a wide-ranging and historic "internal dialogue" on all issues...

...These horrors are the stuff of daily life in Cuba...

...Convicted of treason, Matos spent 20 years in jail...

...Arenas was among the hundreds of thousands of Cubans driven into the field to work the harvest...

...Meanwhile, behind the aging oligarchs of the Sierra Maestra generation, there is an entire state full of bureaucrats who know that they will live to see the fall of communism in Cuba and have to think about what happens next...

...Miami representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen gave the president a beaming thumbs-up, not stopping to think that what defines these three countries as a group is not the repressiveness of their governments (he could then have mentioned China or Saudi Arabia) but rather their strategic irrelevance...

...The 1980 Mariel boatlift brought 140,000 Cubans to Miami, and another 300,000 have followed under a visa program negotiated by the Clinton administration to try to alleviate the refugee crisis...

...The regime has to commit suicide or be overthrown before the United States will deign to have any contact with it...

...All those who participated in cutting the sugarcane were young recruits who had to work there obligatorily...

...embargo...

...government moved to liberalize its Cuba policy...

...WHAT CASTRO WROUGHT Cuba would now be shaped by Castro's personal—and often sadistic—caprices...

...During the Cold War, we had diplomatic relations with every country in the Warsaw Pact...

...That will force him towards reform...

...The Clinton administration relaxed some aspects of the embargo and made it easier to travel there...

...In 1965 Castro launched a plan to increase the sugar harvest to 10 million tons of sugarcane in 1970...

...By Mario Loyola Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who fled the Cuban Revolution at the age of six in 1960, is the Bush administration's point man on Cuba policy...

...For the Cubans who left during the revolution, the island had simply ceased to exist...

...It is the negotiating posture of somebody who has no interest in negotiating...

...This has not cut the Castro regime off from resources: Cuba receives as much aid from Venezuela's Hugo Chavez as Israel gets from the United States...

...And if someone should try to escape punishment by claiming to have been an unwilling passenger on your boat, you would be charged with terrorism, a capital offense...

...policy to profit from the work that Carlos Saladrigas and others have done to build consensus for change among Cubans and to prepare for the end of communism—and of exile...

...Castro's solution was more dictatorship...

...In October, John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee for president, accused the Eisenhower administration (and by implication his opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon) of permitting the creation of "Communism's first Caribbean base" and allowing Castro to arm himself to the teeth with Soviet weapons...

...What they got was a cataclysm...

...Castro had been in power nearly two years...

...The farm was, in reality, an immense military unit...

...We started extending large loans to the Soviet Union in the 1970s and made trade a cornerstone of China policy from the moment of Nixon's opening...

...ROOTS OF HOPE Fidel Castro, the immovable ideological core of the Cuban Revolution, is gone from power and will never come back—in a recent interview released by Cuban state television, Castro showed difficulty completing simple sentences...

...The United States should encourage the Cuban regime to talk to dissident leaders such as Osvaldo Paya— but we should listen to them, too...

...embargo is working...

...policy is increasing the risk that the transition, when it comes, will be violent...

...For the regime to admit that people want change and the freedom to talk about it, necessarily empowers public opinion as a force in opposition to party ideology...

...In January, Washington broke off diplomatic relations...

...If the administration were really aiming to end communism in Cuba, it would look to the policies that worked against communism elsewhere...

...Castro traveled to the province and personally reversed the verdict, arguing that technicalities could not get in the way of the "revolutionary conscience...

...And it is increasingly poisonous to the interests of the United States...

...That terrifies Cuba's dissidents—and poses grave risks for the United States...

...The United States can help him: allowing Cuba access to microfinancing (even if that also gives the regime access to more resources) and letting American firms import products manufactured by privately owned businesses there...

...government should be negotiating for incremental transition, because even the smallest reforms will fuel popular expectations for more change...

...In 1992, Carlos Lage, then finance minister and now vice president, spent many months in Europe putting together a package of reforms aimed at encouraging small business...

...They ran out of fuel on the high seas, and Cuban forces brought the ferry back...

...They were executed within days...

...The all-or-nothing approach of U.S...

...And escape is all but impossible...

...Exiles urging dialogue were silenced through intimidation and terrorism...

...Castro balked on ideological grounds (he could not live with the thought that someone in Cuba might make a profit), but now that he is effectively out of power, Lage is likely to want to try again...

...policy—now protect the regime he is leaving behind...

...For those Cubans who have arrived in the United States in the last quarter-century, who actually had to live under the Castro regime, Cuba remains very much present, and such exiles are now in the majority in America...

...Castro had no patience for dissent and was always willing to contradict the consensus of his advisers, just to show them that he was in charge...

...Student groups in the United States, such as Roots of Hope, are already nourishing contacts with Cuba's largely dissident youth...

...To enter one of those places was to enter the last circle of hell...

...Cubans would travel to the new collective farms "begging to buy eggs and chicken...

...Many were also charged with piracy: By law there is no such thing as a private boat in Cuba, so trying to get across the Florida Straits—even if it's in your own fishing boat— is by the government's definition an act of piracy...

...Maybe so...

...For decades the United States has maintained a policy of complete ostracism of Cuba—no travel, no trade, no remittances, no diplomatic relations...

...Helms-Burton forbids any dealings with Cuba until the regime meets a lengthy wish list of conditions and until both Fidel Castro and his brother Raul are out of power...

...President Bush gave a clue to why this policy survives in his 2007 State of the Union speech when he said, "We will continue to speak out for the cause of freedom in places like Cuba, Belarus, and Burma...

...Forced labor has been replaced by involuntary indolence...

...In an echo of perestroika and glasnost, two words have crept into official propaganda in the last year: "change" and "dialogue...

...The United States can eliminate the first one whenever it wants, and the second will soon eliminate itself...

...Every major dissident group in Cuba has called for the United States to lift the restrictions on travel and remittances for Cuban exiles...

...My answer is an emphatic yes," he recently explained...

...Today, sunk by the fall of the Soviet Union, food production in Cuba is less than half of what it was in 1959, and the sugar harvest is less than a tenth of what it was then...

...When the archbishop of Santiago publicly protested, Castro turned on the church and confiscated all property held by religious organizations...

...The Communist regime in Cuba," he explains, "has been able to get legitimacy from two sources: the conflict with the United States and the charisma of Fidel...

...Castro's initial base of support was among the urban middle class—university students, professionals, and small-business owners who wanted democracy...

...Saladrigas notes that Raul Castro is in a much weaker position than his brother and will have to base his legitimacy on actual results...

...These exiles know that the problems of Cuba go far beyond Castro...

...But, when a pair of American Cessnas were shot down by the Cuban air force in 1996, he reversed course...

...The dissidents were tried for "terrorism, piracy, and attempt to illegally exit the national territory" in a proceeding that lasted just a few hours...

...Cuba's people began their lonely journey into the endless calamities of Castro's dictatorship...

...less than half of them support the embargo...

...Republicans in Congress fought these moves tooth-and-nail, drafting the Helms-Burton Act to codify the policy of ostracism...

...Nixon convinced Eisenhower to react sharply, and, on October 19, the president imposed an embargo on all trade with Cuba...

...WASHINGTON REACTS TO CASTRO The current U.S...

...policy towards Cuba was born in the elections of 1960...

...Reports of kangaroo courts and summary executions carried live on television horrified the American public, while Castro's fratricidal consolidation of power—along with sweeping seizures of foreign-owned property and military support from the Soviet Union—awoke Washington to a near menace...

...The U.S...

...The economy no longer produces much of anything...

...After the Bay of Pigs invasion failed in 1961, Castro slammed the door shut on the exodus...

...Carlos Saladrigas, who escaped Cuba in 1961 and is one of the exile community's most successful businessmen, formed the Cuba Study Group in 2000 to examine policy alternatives...

...I had seen trials in which young men were condemned to twenty and thirty years in prison for the mere fact that on the weekend, they had gone to visit their families, their mothers, their girlfriends...

...The transformation of Cuba into a prison was now complete, with two sets of walls—one erected by Castro to keep everyone in and the other erected by Washington to keep everyone and everything out...

...Among them are future allies of the United States...

...Worse still, just as American officials knew in 1960 that the embargo would push Cuba further into the Soviet bloc, they are well aware that the present policy is pushing Cuba into the arms of Venezuela and Iran— more unwillingly...

...Few Americans are old enough to remember that Cuba was once modern and vibrant, a powerhouse of cultural influence...

...This is the process that destroyed the Communist political monopoly in Eastern Europe and in no case did it follow the rigid prescriptions of Helms-Burton...

...Making the exile community a bridge to Cuba would also allow U.S...

...THE EXILES In the exile community, opposition to Castro was for decades absolute and nonnegotiable...

...When the guerilla leader Huber Matos, the comandante of Camagiiey province, attacked the drift towards communism in 1959, Castro sent Matos's best friend to arrest him...

...They would remain implacably opposed to any relaxation of the U.S...

...Even among exiles who arrived in the early years of the revolution, there is growing frustration with a policy that has never produced any tangible benefit...

...Meanwhile, Cubans continue to suffer silently, knowing that sooner or later something has to change...

...In April 2003, dissidents seized a local ferry and headed north towards the coast of Florida...

...For the new exiles, Cuba's nightmarish privations weigh more than politics...

...For my grandfather, a pharmacist in the eastern seaside town of Manzanillo who had delivered medicines to Castro's guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra mountains, this was the final straw...

...Betrayed by their former hero, these Cubans would hate Castro with an enduring passion...

...Saladrigas focuses on the fact that dictatorships need legitimacy...

...Sugar production began to decline and never stopped...

...The effort proved unsustainable...

...That alone could reduce the terrible isolation in which Cuba's dissidents are now struggling...

...Many Cubans are currently serving long prison sen-tences—generally between 20 and 30 years, often without beds or medical attention—convicted of nothing more than attempting "to exit the national territory illegally...

...Along with hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, he and his family fled to the United States...

...In his 1992 memoir Before Night Falls, a horrifying and brilliant chronicle of the Cuban Revolution's first two decades, Reinaldo Arenas recalls that by 1961 basic foodstuffs had disappeared from the markets...

...But that has changed...

...One problem facing the Polish Communist regime in the 1980s was the fact that they owed the West $40 billion and were in desperate need of debt relief...

...Most ominously, Cuba could become a failing state, overrun by armed gangs with ties to drug trafficking and international terrorism, as in much of Central America...

...some offered to pay any price for a chicken, but they were denied because a farm 'of the people' couldn't sell to individuals...

...But it has also supplied the Castro regime with two things it vitally needs: isolation and a foreign enemy who is not a real threat...

...Just ten years later, Castro's ruinous policies—incompetent even by Communist standards—had made Cuba one of the poorest countries in the world...

...With its "Pillars" declaration, Cuban Consensus—an umbrella organization of dissident and exile groups including the once hardline Cuban American National Foundation—has created a framework of reconciliation for the post-Castro era...

...That irrelevance—and the tragic inertia it has injected into U.S...

...The embargo has denied Castro resources...

...CONGRESSIONAL STRAITJACKET After the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S...

...Castro so thoroughly ruined Cuba as to make it irrelevant...

...As Arenas noted, in a totalitarian society, "Calamities are endless...

...As Walter Lippmann observed in The Good Society (1937), the organizing principle of a Marxist society is not Marxism but militarism...

...Mario Loyola is a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies...

...The policy has accomplished little except to protect the Castro regime from the outside influences that proved fatal to communism in Europe...

...Laritza Diversent, a dissident writing from Havana, recently lamented the "prostitution, delinquency, and corruption that have become indispensable means of subsistence...

...Clinton refused to sign it...

...It could lead to another refugee crisis...

...His brother is far less ideological and never contradicts the consensus of his advisers...

...In the months that followed, Castro dramatically increased the seizure of private property and criminalized the free press...

...He is often asked whether the U.S...

...In 1959, Cuba's per capita GDP was among the highest in Latin America...

...With an indifference that would become characteristic of Washington's attitude, the secretary of commerce, Frederick Henry Mueller, remarked, "If it pushes them into trade with the Communist bloc, that's just too bad...